Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (review)

Stephen Greenblatt pursues a painterly rather than linear approach to his biographical tale of Will in the World, elaborating several central narratives at the heart of Shakespeare's life: Shakespeare as the transgressive "personator/impersonator" of nobility and kings; Shakespeare as the creator of a linguistic philosopher's stone whose words transmuted his curiosity, keen observation, and absorbed reading into a new vocabulary of imagination; Shakespeare as the consummate theater professional/ entrepreneur wholly committed (to the probable exclusion of involvement in his married life) to his work as actor, performer, share owner/writer for the early modern stage; and last but not least, Shakespeare as a man of dual religious consciousness whose enforced public adherence to Church of England observances likely masked a dangerous inner allegiance to the rituals of the old faith. It is this last guise which, for Greenblatt, leads to Shakespeare's final development as the world's greatest dramatist of inwardness.

Greenblatt conjoins the life of the artist and the life of his art, elaborating what he persuasively argues to be these central narratives of Shakespeare's life. Thus, Will in the World stands ultimately as an illuminated reading of Shakespeare's works while drawing on them to supplement the gaps, cruxes, and often too slender threads of historical documents.

If it sometimes requires a grain of salt, Greenblatt's speculation yields page upon page of delectation. An example is his discussion of A Midsummer Night's Dream, whose genesis is traced to what the young Will may have seen at Queen Elizabeth's sumptuous royal progress and stay at Kenilworth Castle. Here Will probably witnessed elaborate entertainments of fireworks, pageants, bearbaiting, acrobatics, and a water pageant, along with a "catalogue of theatrical catastrophe" that plagued a Coventry Hock Tuesday performance, mishaps the Queen graciously overlooked, commanding a second performance a week later. Greenblatt connects Will's possible presence at the grand spectacle to nuanced layers of joyous mockery that make A Midsummer Night's Dream play-within-the-play something far greater than a comically botched job of hobnail-booted rustics put down by condescending nobility: "What saves the sense of derision from becoming too painful, what keeps it delicious in fact, is the self-possession of the artisans. They are unflappable" (52). This critical appreciation is interwoven with a description of the metatheatrical dynamics of early modern performance: "The laughter that the scene solicits is curiously tender and loving," since Shakespeare also "showed signs of sympathy and solidarity with the rude mechanicals, making them carpenters, bellows-makers, joiners—in fact, the very artisans standing there as groundlings. They too became stage managers, writers" because of the way in which the scene calls upon their "transforming imaginative powers" (53).

Greenblatt's discussion of the events surrounding The Merchant of Venice provides a segue into the second half of the book, a true page-turner that tackles the profundity of Shakespeare's great tragedies in their charting of a new world of human inwardness. Here Greenblatt poses intriguing questions about why Shakespeare's "individual talent" eschewed the obvious byways of his sources, creating masterworks that overwhelm and stretch traditional genre and language boundaries to the max. Recounting events surrounding the execution of Roderigo Lopez, the Queen's physician and a converted Jew, Greenblatt's Merchant of Venice chapter focuses on the peculiar way in which Shylock's situation, similar to that of Lopez, hauntingly dominates a play that would much more easily have fit a commercial comic mold had Shakespeare simply stuck to his source and cast Shylock as an over-the-top comic Vice figure.

In treating the great tragedies, Greenblatt blends psychobiography and psychohistory to argue that another episode in Shakespeare's life, the death of his son Hamnet, was crucially important to his newly-developing mode of writing. As in his earlier Hamlet in Purgatory, the case is made that drastically-curtailed Protestant rites of mourning for his dead son Hamnet forced Shakespeare's...